Today’s drive along US 70 was a mostly pleasant drive through the Appalachian Mountains with lots of ups and downs and curvy roads (again making me long for the Miata), small towns and cities, and wonderful views of gently rolling hills, mountains, lakes and rivers. (US 70 from the Arkansas border to the intersection of I 40 and US 11W is mostly along Tennessee’s First State Highway (SR 1) which is a historic route from Arkansas to Virginia dating from 1915).

Watts Bar Lake

As our travel day was drawing to a close, we decided to push on east of Knoxville to Sevierville. Leaving Knoxville, US 70 joins I 40 without warning and we found ourselves heading northeast on on US 11E. Pulling into a parking lot, we let google choose a place for us to stay which required that we get on I 40. As we approached our destination, we were suddenly struck with deja vu. Purely by luck, google had selected the same place we had stayed once before (I think it was our last trip, last year.) It’s a lovely place way up above I 40 with a commanding view of the valley below. The grounds are very pretty with multiple seating areas and a fire pit. The only drawback is the noise from I-40. 

Apparently, the last time we were here we were quickly passing through. Since we are in the final stretch of our travels and don’t need to be anywhere for 3 days, we paid more attention to the surrounding areas. We discovered that we are about 10 minutes from Pigeon Forge and about 45 minutes from the Great Smoky National Park. Since both places interest us, we decided to stay here an extra day and do some exploring. With that decision made, we went in search of dinner. We headed to the Chop House on the other side of the highway. As we pulled into the parking lot, we realized that we had tried to eat there on our last trip here. That time the parking lot was so full there were no parking spaces to be found. This evening luck was on our side. We shared a prime rib dinner which was excellent. It was such a lovely evening we sat our by the fireplace at our lodging and watched the sunset. We had hoped to watch the moon rise, but it must have been behind the hill. After visiting with some fellow travelers and learning about two craft breweries in San Diego (for our next visit there), we headed back to our room to catch up on the blog.

Sunset

Editorial comment: The only downer in today’s travels was the encroaching, invasive kudzu vines. In some areas, they were really choking out some of the green plants and bushes. The vines grow along power poles and can pull down power lines.